How To Build a Water Cooled Mini-ITX SFF PC w/ Ivy Bridge & Kepler

2TB WD Caviar Black HDD & EVGA GeForce GTX 670

Western Digital says their Caviar Black series (7200 RPM) of 3.5-inch hard drives are ideal for power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, and maxed out gaming computers. That sounds like just the drive we need to store our videos and photos, so we went with the 2TB model with part number WD2002FAEX. This drive features the SATA III (600 MBps) interface and 64MB of cache, so we’ll be able to take full advantage of the functionality of our Intel Z77 Express chipset and get some nice read and write speeds with this drive.

We went with the WD Caviar Black 2TB OEM version that comes with nothing more than just the bare drive in a plain box. This is all we needed as we got SATA cables with the ASUS board and the Cubitek Mini ICE comes with special mounting hardware to install it into the case.

To get the drive installed in our case we just needed to install the special roller wheels and roll it right into one of the open hard drive slots and plug it in. It was very easy and the roller wheels are a nice touch.

We wanted to run an NVIDIA Kepler (GeForce 600 Series) in our system and while the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 690 would have been able to fit, we opted for the GeForce GTX 670 as the performance on this card is impressive and it is more affordable with prices starting at $399. We went with the EVGA GeForce GTX 670 2GB Superclocked , which retails for $419.99 under part number 02G-P4-2672. This card has been factory overclocked on both the core and memory, so it should run our games just fine.

EVGA GeForce GTX 670 Superclocked Features:

Base Clock: 967 MHz

Boost Clock: 1046 MHz

Memory Clock: 6210 MHz (effective)

Memory Size: 2GB GDDR5

Texture Fill Rate: 108.3 GT/s

Memory Bandwidth: 198.72GB/sec

The EVGA graphics card uses the NVIDIA reference design for the PCB and the GPU cooler, but has been dressed up a bit to look unique. Besides adding several stickers to the plastic fan shroud, EVGA also changed out the standard exhaust bracket for a high-flow version that reduces noise and lowers temperatures.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 670 SC was able to fit just fine in the Cubitek Mini ICE even with the optional lower 140mm case fan installed that is 25mm thick. You can also see the Western Digital 3.5″ desktop hard drive installed in the drive cage just above the Kingston HyperX 2.5″ Solid-State drive.